John Irving - A Son of the Circus

Of course! Dhar’s twin was the first American missionary in the highly esteemed 125-year history of St. Ignatius; neither the church nor the school had been blessed with an American missionary before. Dhar’s twin was what the Jesuits call a scholastic, which Dr. Daruwalla already understood to mean that he’d endured much religious and philosophic study and that he’d taken his simple vows. However, the doctor knew, Dhar’s twin was still a few years away from being ordained as a priest. This was a period of soul-searching, Dr. Daruwalla supposed—the final test of those simple vows.

The vows themselves gave Farrokh the shivers. Poverty, chastity, obedience—they weren’t so “simple.” It was hard to imagine the progeny of a Hollywood screenwriter like Danny Mills opting for poverty; it was harder still to conceive of the offspring of Veronica Rose choosing chastity. And regarding the tricky Jesuitical ramifications of obedience, Dr. Daruwalla knew that he himself didn’t know nearly enough. What he also suspected was that, should one of those crafty Jesuits try to explain “obedience” to him, the explanation itself would be a marvel of equivocation—of oversubtle reasoning—and, in the end, Farrokh would have no clearer understanding of a vow of obedience than he’d had before. In Dr. Daruwalla’s estimation, the Jesuits were intellectually crafty and sly. And this was hardest of all for the doctor to imagine: that a child of Danny Mills and Veronica Rose could be intellectually crafty and sly. Even Dhar, who’d had a decent European education, was no intellectual.

But then Dr. Daruwalla reminded himself that Dhar and his twin could also be the genetic creation of Neville Eden. Neville had always struck Farrokh as crafty and sly. What a puzzle! Just what was a man who was almost 40 doing by becoming—or trying to become—a priest? What failures had led him to this? Farrokh assumed that only blunders or disillusionments could lead a man to vows of such a radically repressive nature.

Now here was Father Cecil saying that “young Martin” had mentioned, in a letter, that Dr. Daruwalla was “an old friend of the family.” So his name was Martiri—Martin Mills. Farrokh remembered that, in her letter to him, Vera had already told him this. And “young Martin” wasn’t so young, Dr. Daruwalla knew—except to Father Cecil, who was 72. But the gist of Father Cecil’s phone message caught Dr. Daruwalla by surprise.

“Do you know exactly when he’s coming?” Father Cecil asked.

What does he mean—do I know? Farrokh thought. Why doesn’t he know? But neither Father Julian nor Father Cecil could remember exactly when Martin Mills was arriving; they blamed Brother Gabriel for losing the American’s letter.

Brother Gabriel had come to Bombay and St. Ignatius after the Spanish Civil War; he’d been on the Communist side, and his first contribution to St. Ignatius had been to collect the Russian and Byzantine icons for which the mission chapel and its icon-collection room were famous. Brother Gabriel was also in charge of the mail.

When Farrokh was 10 or 12 and a student at St. Ignatius, Brother Gabriel would have been 26 or 28; Dr. Daruwalla remembered that Brother Gabriel was at that time still struggling to learn Hindi and Marathi, and that his English was melodious, with a Spanish accent. The doctor recalled a short, sturdy man in a black cassock, exhorting an army of sweepers to raise more and more clouds of dust from the stone floors. Farrokh also remembered that Brother Gabriel was in charge of the other servants, and the garden, and the kitchen, and the linen room—in addition to the mail. But the icons were his passion. He was a friendly, vigorous man, neither an intellectual nor a priest, and Dr. Daruwalla calculated that, today, Brother Gabriel would be around 75. No wonder he’s losing letters, Farrokh thought.

So no one knew exactly when Dhar’s twin would arrive! Father Cecil added that the American’s teaching duties would commence almost immediately. St. Ignatius didn’t recognize the week between Christmas and New Year’s as a holiday; only Christmas Day and New Year’s Day were school vacations, an annoyance that Farrokh remembered from his own school days. The doctor guessed that the school was still sensitive to the charge made by many non-Christian parents that Christmas was overemphasized.

It was possible, Father Cecil opined, that young Martin would make contact with Dr. Daruwalla before he contacted anyone at St. Ignatius. Or perhaps the doctor had already heard from the American? Already heard? thought Dr. Daruwalla, in a panic.

Here was Dhar’s twin—due to arrive any day now—and Dhar still didn’t know! And the naïve American would arrive at Sahar Airport at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning; that was when all the flights from Europe and North America arrived. (Dr. Daruwalla presumed that all Americans coming to India were “naïve.”) At that dreadfully early hour, St. Ignatius would quite literally be closed—like a castle, like an army barracks, like the compound or the cloister that it was. If the priests and brothers didn’t know exactly when Martin Mills was arriving, no one would leave any lights on or any doors open for him—no one would meet his plane. And so the bewildered missionary might come directly to Dr. Daruwalla; he might simply show up on the doctor’s doorstep at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. (Dr. Daruwalla presumed that all missionaries coming to India were “bewildered.”)

Farrokh couldn’t remember what he’d written to Vera. Had he given the horrid woman his home address or the address of the Hospital for Crippled Children? Fittingly, she’d written to him in care of the Duckworth Club. Of Bombay, of all of India, it was possibly only the Duckworth Club that Vera remembered. (Doubtless she’d repressed the cow.)

Damn other people’s messes! Dr. Daruwalla was muttering aloud. He was a surgeon; as such, he was an extremely neat and tidy man. The sheer sloppiness of human relationships appalled him, especially those relationships to which he felt he’d brought a special responsibility and care. Brother-sister, brother-brother, child-parent, parent-child. What was the matter with human beings, that they made such a shambles out of these basic relationships?

Dr. Daruwalla didn’t want to hide Dhar from his twin. He didn’t want to hurt Danny—with the cruel evidence of what his wife had done, and how she’d lied—but he felt he was largely protecting Vera by helping her to keep her lie intact. As for Dhar, he was so disgusted by everything he’d heard about his mother, he’d stopped being curious about her when he was in his twenties; he’d never expressed a desire to know her—not even to meet her. Admittedly, his curiosity about his father had persisted into his thirties, but Dhar had lately seemed resigned to the fact that he would never know him. Perhaps the proper word was “hardened,” not “resigned.”

At 39, John D. had simply grown accustomed to not knowing his mother and father. But who wouldn’t want to know, or at least meet, his own twin? Why not simply introduce the fool missionary to his twin? the doctor asked himself. “Martin, this is your brother—you’d better get used to the idea.” (Dr. Daruwalla presumed that all missionaries were, in one way or another, fools.) Telling the truth to Dhar’s twin would serve Vera right, Farrokh thought. It might even prevent Martin Mills from doing anything as confining as becoming a priest. It was most definitely the Anglican in Dr. Daruwalla that stopped short of the very idea of chastity, which seemed utterly confining to him.

Farrokh remembered what his contentious father had had to say about chastity. Lowji had considered the subject in the light of Gandhi’s experience. The Mahatma had been married at 13; he was 37 when he took a vow of sexual abstinence. “By my calculations,” Lowji had said, “this amounts to twenty-four years of sex. Many people don’t have that many years of sex in their entire lifetime. So the Mahatma chose sexual abstinence after twenty-four years of sexual activity. He was a bloody womanizer flanked by a bunch of Mary Magdalenes!”